


The Only Soldier Now Is Me

by samalander



Series: Like a Liar Would Believe [1]
Category: Marvel (Movies), The Avengers (2012)
Genre: Backstory, Extensive Headcanon, F/M, Friendship, SpyBros
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-06-14
Updated: 2012-06-14
Packaged: 2017-11-07 18:30:46
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 13,516
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/434090
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/samalander/pseuds/samalander
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She told Loki that Barton was sent to kill her, and he made a different call. That’s only part of the story. And not even the most interesting part. An examination of Natasha Romanova's journey to SHIELD and the Avengers.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. the fingerprints on me from you

**Author's Note:**

> Title and Chapter names from Suzanne Vega's "Marlene on the Wall"  
>  _Her mocking smile says it all_  
>  As she records the rise and fall  
> Of every soldier passing  
> But the only soldier now is me  
> I'm fighting things I cannot see  
> I think it's called my destiny  
> That I am changing

Natasha Romanova throbbed back to consciousness with no sense of the fifty-five years she'd slept for. One moment she'd been surrounded by her handlers, her captors, and they told her to breathe deep, the wound from Lev's shot hot in her shoulder, and she did. She always inhaled their lies because she didn't know how not to. It was how she was programmed.

When her eyes opened again in the next moment, it was all gone - Lev, Doctor Belov, Petrovitch, every one of them was absent - and the lone man standing in the room wasn't anyone she could categorize.

She was off the table in moments, the muscles in her shoulder healed - sore and stiff, but not torn, and the anesthetic leaving her system with a preternatural speed. She was on the mystery man before he could speak, before he could react, and she had him pinned to the wall by his throat, his feet kicking uselessly at the air.

He brought up a hand to claw ineffectually at hers, to get her to release the pressure, but she calmly took his fingers in hers and beant the middle one back until it snapped. He screamed in pain and panted for breath.

"Please." He was begging, and she would pity him if she had that emotion on her file. She didn't though, it was inaccessible, so she calmly snapped another finger.

"Watchword," she growled, and he coughs, his eyes going wide with fear. She realized he had no idea who she was or what she was capable of. 

"I am Doctor-" he started.

"Wrong," she told him. She gave him another three seconds to say something useful, but he just whined and moaned, succumbing to pain, so she snapped his neck with a flick of her wrist. 

Natasha loved the moment when life drained out of a mark, and she laughed at the man in her hand as he became a corpse. It was a bitter sound in the empty room, reverberating off the high ceiling and compounded by the _slide-thump-smack_ of flesh as she dropped his body onto the floor, registering for the first time that she was completely nude.

She went in search of clothes and her guns.

* * *

_The first time she sees Lev, he's in the infirmary, Doctor Belov clucking over his arm, which looks like it was shorn clean off at the shoulder. She remembers the experiments they performed on Raisa when she was declared unfit._

_She was able to control most of her hand again before she died. Maybe this one has a chance._

* * *

It had been fifty-five years since her ill-timed escape attempt from the Red Room, and she had missed much. It wasn't even the Soviet Union any more, it was Mother Russia like it had been for her parents- she figured that out by taking a newspaper from a shop on the corner and watching teenagers drink Coca-Cola like it wasn't the straight bilge of the capitalists.

Things had changed - streets had new names, there was slang she doesn't know, buildings had disappeared and new ones sprung up in new places. But she still knew the rooms in the compound, could still navigate to her hiding places seamlessly.

The first cache was right in the facility, down through the machine room and into the undercity, where she'd stashed knives and guns and ammunition, as well as a change of clothes. She never know when she might need one. None of her stores of supplies in this city were very far out - she could only go so far without triggering sensors in the Red Room, and she learned her limits quickly.

She had caches at safehouses in other places, of course, but St. Petersburg was her home, it was where her sisters and her compound were; she didn't need other caches.

If any of her sisters were alive, they would be in hiding. Natasha knew they must be somewhere, that _Lev_ must be somewhere, because he was her Winter Soldier, and she was his Black Widow and they made promises on dark nights that the man she loved would never break.

So she decided to contact them the only way she knew how.

Her knife slid slickly into the throats of the children, angels wrapped in bed sheets with gaudy cartoons printed on them - she wondered, in the part of her brain that was dormant, if she was ever so innocent, or if her pacifiers had razor blades in them. It would be just like Petrovitch to give an infant a hand grenade and see what happened.

The family dog was next, loyal at the door of the master bedroom. From inside she heard the sounds of coitus - fat, greasy, bourgeois intercourse, something done for pleasure and self and not the state. She debated waiting to go in for a moment; she didn't want this man to have his wife's cunt be the last thing he felt. She wanted his death to overcome any remnants of orgasm, but she had never been patient with easy prey, preferring the no-muss method, so she threw the door open, and, in the seconds it took the couple within to register her interruption, she'd put a single bullet through his back and into his wife's head. A convenient angle.

He was still alive, but his lung was punctured and he gasped up at her, uncomprehending. This man was no one, a man whose father worked in the Red Room, the one who used to administer the electrodes for shock therapy. But his father was dead, so she had chosen to visit his sins upon the family.

She slit the gasping man's throat, and dipped her finger in the blood cooling between him and his wife on the bed. She pressed her stained finger to the wall and wrote, in her large careful letters, "жёлтая". If any of her sisters heard of this, heard whispers of the word for yellow, their word for trouble, written on a wall in blood, they would understand. They would find her.

She waited three days after the killing, spending her time learning how to work the computer in the public library well enough to get addresses of the people she needed to kill. It was easier than it should be, almost intuitive, and she wondered, for the first time that she can remember, what they might have done to her brain when she was in surgeries, when she was unconscious, but she pushed the thought away as unuseful. When she found her sisters, or Lev, there would be time for wonder. But for now there was only _alone_.

She read the newspapers when they were published, and though they wrote about her killing, they never mentioned the word she wrote. Perhaps they thought she was a serial killer, perhaps they were trying to goad her into further action. Either way, she decided to move.

She tried to leave St. Petersburg on a passenger train, but it turned out that in the time she slept, money had changed. Now that she was trying to buy something and not just stealing, she found her rubles were defunct and replaced with something called Euros, so she stowed away in the back of a truck instead, and she headed south, to Moscow.

* * *

She stayed in Moscow for two weeks and fell into a pattern there, killing someone connected with the Red Room every two or three days, leaving her calling card on walls and floors near her victims.

The police were inept; they didn't seem to have a clue what her code meant or what her pattern was. She was thankful, on some level, for the paranoia of Petrovitch, who never left any more records than he could swallow.

* * *

The body count in Moscow had reached 15 in four hits when she left and headed south again, this time with money she pilfered from one of the houses, a decadent mansion exactly like all the other decadent mansions on that block. She wondered how people got so rich and complacent, when there were still people like her out there. Don't they know there were wolves at the door, monsters under the stairs?

This time she was heading to the city she was born in, the one where Petrovitch found her; it was called Stalingrad then, and she would always call it that in her heart, even if the maps named it Volgograd. She was going to look for Petrovich, though he'd be an old man, because none of her sisters had found her yet. So she rode south, chasing her maker.

* * *

She found him in a graveyard just beyond the city limits, tombstone white with driving snow. His name wasn't Petrovich there, but it was him just the same. Vasily Polzin, one of his code names, died twenty years before she found him, a beloved father and grandfather.

 _Well_ , she thought, _sometimes secrets are hereditary._

* * *

His second son, Aleksei Vasilyev, was a fat man who sat behind a desk all day, yelling into a telephone and sweating over pieces of paper and bytes of data that flitted by him. Natasha thought that, in another life, she might have liked this man, might have helped to raise him, but despite their common father - well, common maker - Natasha knew that all she wanted from this man was his information.

She watched him for two days, and if he'd heard of the killings in St. Petersburg and Moscow, he didn't seem to be overly jumpy about them. He didn't notice her tailing him home, did't see the glint of her scope outside his window while he stood looking out, indolent and smoking a cigar.

He had a younger lover, Aleksei did, a man five or ten years his junior, who Natasha thought was probably innocent of anything having to do with the family business. Still, that didn't make him innocent in all things, and even if it did, innocence had never stopped her before. She was what she was programmed to be.

When they left on the third day, Aleksei for his boring job and the lover - Dmitri - for his, she entered the house and began preparations. By the time they returned home that evening, she'd been ready for hours, secreted in the attic, knives in her sleeves, a gun strapped to her thigh, and sedatives in the rich chocolates they had for dessert every night. Enough to kill Dmitri, but with Aleksei's weight difference, it should only have paralyzed him. She would have answers before he bled.

Except they skipped dessert that night, and Natasha didn't have the stomach to sit in their musty, hot crawlspace while they watched television and discussed current events before trying to get up the will to fornicate.

She dropped from the ceiling quickly as they lay on their bed, watching the evening news. Before either man could utter more than a surprised gasp, she had a knife in each hand and slash of red was blossoming over Dmitri's stomach. She swiped again, hitting his throat, because she was efficient, not cruel, and she could already smell his bowel spilling into his abdomen. A terrible way to go.

Aleksei started to shout and dove for the phone, but she was on him before he got far, his weight against her skill. It took longer than it should, and he got a scream out that the neighbors might have heard before she had an arm across his throat, cutting off his air, and her gun out of her thigh holster, the barrel pressed against the soft flesh of his temple.

"You and I share a father," she told him, and terror bloomed behind his eyes. Good, then, he knew. "Where are my sisters?"

He stuttered nonsense, began to protest ignorance, so she raised the gun and cracked him across the face, knocking teeth out of his jaw and fracturing at least one bone.

"That was one. Want to see what happens when I get to three?"

He whimpered in pain, but called up some reserve of strenghth, enought to spit crimson blood onto the bed. "Red room?" he asked.

She smiled coldly, releasing the safety on her gun.

"Where are they?" she whispered.

His face contorted into ugly defiance, and her finger twitched against the trigger.

"Love is for children," he choked out, and she fired the gun almost before she heard it, but the words bounced into her head, untying knots and shaking loose foundations with their aftershocks.

Natasha rose, stumbled to the wall and vomited bile, thin and yellow. She stayed there for a moment, the acid scent of sick mingling with the cloying smell of blood and gunpowder and the rancid smell of Dmitri's bowels.

The smell brought her back to herself, whatever herself was, and she felt the ropes that were severed being retied into unfamiliar configurations. New memories were flooding her; time spent as a ballerina, the name Natalia, a laughing man.

She didn't write her code name on this wall, didn't leave her calling card or her signature or whatever they wanted to call it. She stumbled from the house, bloody footprints in her wake, and dropped into the sewers at her earliest convenience.

She knew the sewers of Volgograd, not by any work she had done but, she realized, because she knew all the sewer systems in every major city in the Soviet Union - which now gave her safehouses in several cities and countries that would be, if not impregnable, at least difficult for her pursuers to navigate.

Natasha found a tunnel that was mostly dry and didn't reek, and she sat there, bricks cool against her back, trying to grab at the words he said.

 _Love is for children._ She whispered it to herself, over and over and over. She thought the words must mean something, but the inside of her head turned another direction every time she thought it, and she couldn't get a hold of what. She didn't eat, drank fistfuls of rancid sewer water because she couldn't get sick, they had fixed her in a way that let her survive anything, and she sat, muttering to herself as the world spun and fell.

Three days later as dawn was breaking, a filthy, reeking version of Natalia Romonoff emerged from the sewers of Volgograd, and took a ride from the first stranger she saw heading north, back to St. Petersburg and whatever was left of the woman she wasn't.


	2. you and I are still alone

_In her dream, Natasha is six years old, still Natalia, before they gave her any other identity._

_The other girls in the barracks are the same age, roughly, or a little older. She is the youngest in the bunk, but not the newest, not by a long shot._

_A girl is crying in the dark, the new girl, and Natalia thinks she's been crying for hours, days even. "Shut up," a voice barks. It is Malvina, who is the oldest girl in the room at ten years old, but the crying girl only wails louder._

_She'll find no sympathy here, among the sisters of the Red Room, she'll find no salve for her ache. They do not program compassion into these girls, and if one is too weak, if she spends too long crying and can't contain herself, she is deemed unfit._

_Unfit girls get to be experiments until they die, which usually only means a few weeks of agony, their limbs severed or cut open, twitching muscles replaced and bones coated._

_Natalia just wants to sleep._

_She rises from the bed, her sleep shift falling below her knees, the sleeves too long for her short arms, and crosses to the crying girl._

_"If you do not stop, they will kill you," she says softly, and it is the closest thing she has ever felt to sorrow for a human being's weakness. Mostly she's disgusted, but if the girl can't take two days in the Red Room, she'll never make the program, she'll be meat._

_The girl takes a shaky breath and reaches out for Natalia. "Mommy," she says, and Natalia has had enough. She's small but she's strong, already the veteran of her first five surgeries, and she allows herself to be drawn into a hug for the sake of leverage. When she's flush against the over girl's chest, Natalia reaches up, one hand on either side of her face, and jerks the other girl's head, hard, hearing the crack of a broken neck._

_The other girl slumps back onto the bed, quiet now, and Natalia walks back to her bunk. She sleeps soundly._

* * *

Natalia woke in the familiar cold of the bunker in St. Petersburg, dreams clinging to her brain like spiderwebs, like ghosts.

She knew that her dream didn't happen, of course, that she was never a murderous six-year-old girl. She was a ballerina in her youth and she lived with her mother in Leningrad until she reached the age of 18 and enrolled in the Red Room program. She knew they froze her, yes, that she'd been asleep since 1950, but that was because they knew she would be needed. There were two lives in her, but she knew with a stunning certainty that she could not quantify - she caled it truth - that her memories were real, and the other her, the little girl with the cold eyes, was a myth, a monster of the night. She had a lifetime of happy memories in her days, and an eternity of nightmares in her dreams.

She'd been back from killing Petrovich's son for a month, and little Natalia, Natasha the Killer, is gone. She knew that Natasha was there, is still living under her skin, but Natalia, the woman she was in the now, has no access to her.

The phrase must have deactivated her, she knew that, too. It must have been the kill-switch they built in to turn her inside out. She didn't have words for the hurt, the fuzzy, shifting memory of three days in a sewer, shaking apart and trying to coalesce, but she'd managed to salvage something, something she named Natalia because she didn't know what else to call it.

Natalia had all of Natasha's abilities, her same hard, sharp body, and it still obeyed her commands. She could still make her way from the bowels of the compound to the top in under a minute if she needed to. But there was something missing, something of the singleminded need for her to find her sisters.

The killing didn't bother her, she was still willing to do what she was built to do - because a car could not fly, and a plane didn't use roads, but she thought, Natalia did, that she could do it for other people. It could be her livelihood.

And so Natalia made the first choice of her short, long, confusing and blurry life - she went to look for work.

* * *

Yuri Drakov was built like a sylph, his skinny hips and russet skin reminding Natalia of something that she couldn't name. But his slight appearance was deceiving - he was a whip, a stiletto, as deadly as any of the well-muscled bodyguards who flanked him.

And he was Natalia's first employer.

She hadn't had to work hard to find him - she was pre-programmed, it seemed, with the information of the Russian Underground. Even if the Bratva wasn't now what they were when she was younger - much more into wireless transfers and off-shore accounts than stealing weapons and extorting governments - well, killing never went out of style, and a female assassin was always a positive.

Drakov wasn't a good man and he wasn't kind, but his money came in on time, so Natalia burned down the hospital get his attention, and he had her trail and kill the agents that were sent to shut down his arms dealers and all-in-all, she was a good asset to Drakov's organization.

He owned nightclubs, Drakov, because he was nothing if not a cliche. He would request Natalia's presence there three nights a week, to dance in the crowd, make contacts, do hand-offs, and look pretty at his side.

She hated those nights, because she felt like she was his property when Drakov sat next to her, his eyes slobbering all over her. Natalia was no one's property.

They were crowded into a booth one Saturday night, and Drakov was drinking. He drank often, and to excess. Natalia had one drink, a drink she would nurse the whole night because she could hold her liquor better than most men twice her size, but she liked to be sharp, she liked to be ready.

She saw the man before anyone else, a man moving with the practiced strides of a professional dancer, of a roofrunner, an assassin. Natalia gestured to Oleg, the only one of Drakov's men she even came close to liking, and he hesitated only a moment before he leaned in, under the pretense of taking her drink from her.

"By the DJ booth," she murmured in his ear as he bent over. "Leather pants, shifty eyes, red shirt, blond hair. Assassin."

Oleg nodded, and Natalia watched as he and his men surrounded the blond man, and hauled him away by the collar. It was what she hated about Drakov, in some ways - he wasn't a subtle man, and he should have been. But he paid a decent wage, and didn't ask Natalia to take her dress off for him.

Drakov raised his glass. "A nice catch, Spider," he told her, and she imagined the words oozing out of his mouth. She nodded and sipped her drink. "Tell me," he said, a poison smile on his lips. "Do you want to go- undercover?"

She nodded again, trying not to look over eager. It wasn't that she was bored making club appearance, it was just that - no, she was really really bored by it.

He spelled it out for her, there in the booth, that his baby girl, his daughter Oksana Yuryevna was going to go to Novosibirsk to study mechanics, and he wanted Natalia to be her chaperone-cum-bodyguard. Not because Ksyusha needed protection from boys, but because there were dangerous men out there with big guns, and Drakova was not a safe last name to have.

Natalia shared a surname with Czars and other unsavories, she understood the need for protection in equal measure with pride. She agreed, and two weeks later, she moved to Novosibirsk with the girl.

* * *

Three weeks after that, when Ksyusha was in a class and Natalia had stepped out to get a coffee to keep her awake through applied theoretical physics or whatever it was, a man slid her a note tucked into the cardboard band around her coffee. It was a time, a place, and a number larger than any she'd ever seen before.

The time and the place came, and Natalia attended. Two days later, she handed over the drugged body of her charge, took the money, and smiled. It didn't matter to her what they did to Oksana Yuryevna Drakova. It mattered that Natalia came out on top, and the money in her satchel was enough to get her a safehouse in Bishkek, and the ability to lay low and pick her jobs for a while.

She boarded the train with a smile on her face.

* * *

The job they wanted her to do was easy. Well, easy for Natalia. It would be nigh on impossible for most other mere mortals.

She was set to be paid more money than she had ever seen, and Natalia was not a poor woman. She had houses now, several of them, around Europe and Asia, and even a few contacts in the Americas who were working on sea-side villas and mountaintop chalets in the Andes.

But this contract would dwarf all of that, and all she had to do was infiltrate the G8 conference in St. Petersburg ( _back in Drakov's sight, his daughter's blood on her hands_ ) and take out enough of the American delegation to scare them, enough that her employers could ask for, and receive, favors in return for not doing it again. The only rule was not to kill the American President, and that was a much easier rule than killing him would have been.

She took the job, which was probably stupid and suicidal in equal measure, and put a downpayment on a house in Aukland, just in case she needed it afterwards, before she pulled a bag out of her closet and began to sort weapons, blades and guns and wires for garotting, all for her friends at the conference.

* * *

_She dreams she is 16 again, the first time she put herself in Lev's bed, and he's 24 - too old for her by half, but she doesn't care. He tries to put her off, tries to tell her that she doesn't want this, she's too young, but Natasha has had a lifetime of training in how to make men sweat and beg, and she's not above using it for personal gain, as well as the gain of the state._

_Lev has been training with her, because they fit each other's gaps, they meet in the middle neatly. He has more languages than she does, she has more flexibility and versatility of body than he does. She shows him flips and twists, and he seeks out linguistic tells and obliterates them so that she can be an American one day, so she can infiltrate their government. it's what the Red Room wants from her, its brightest daughter._

_She knows Lev's body now, knows where to apply pressure or lips or fingers, and she knows that he wants her as hungrily as she wants him. Natasha is an expert at waiting, but wanting is new, and she needs to have._

_So she has her first time with Lev, his mechanical arm cold to the touch as his metal fingers cup her chin hard enough to bruise, as his mouth takes and takes and takes and she doesn't have what he wants, but she gives everything anyway._

_She slips out of bed after, pulling on clothes and going to leave the room, and he tracks her movements with his blue eyes. "Natashenka," he says, softly, and she turns, her lip curling._

_"Natasha," she corrects him, and he smiles lazily._

_"We still train at 0800 tomorrow."_

_They sleep together for a year, and train together and eat together and love each other in a way that borders on obsession and skirts danger, until the real war ends and a curtain falls, and the Winter Soldier, her Lev, goes out to the world, and Natasha is left behind to train, and wait, and hope for her own activation._

* * *

Natalia had been awake for a year, she decided, counting the time she was searching as Natasha for her sisters, by the time her G8 caper was due to begin.

It had been a hot summer, and for that Natalia was glad. Heat made people sleepy and sluggish, made them see shimmering asphalt, and disregard the flickers in the corners of their eyes due to heat. She liked hot summers, almost as much as she loved the clouds dotting the St. Petersburg sky, promising rain.

It was a beautiful day to kill.

The US delegation was as stupid as they always were, all bluster and big men, no actual effect. She thought it was a lot like that country had always been - a child in its father's shoes, trying to stomp louder than the other children.

Her plan was beautiful in its simplicity. She would wait until the session was underway, and then detonate an explosive in the US home suite, which was nowhere near where any world leaders would be. It would seem to be a botched job, but she would send 15 or so people home in bodybags, flying over the ocean on ice, while she counted her money in Switzerland.

And, true to the training that the Red Room gave her, the bomb went off and killed mostly minor players. (Well, minor players and the wife of the President of South Africa who had the misfortune to be in the wrong ladies room and was caught in some debris, but that could hardly have been planned for.) She even got away clean - no one suspected the intern from the Russian delegation who had been out for coffee, especially when something that looked like her body was found in the rubble.

Looking back in the future, she would wonder, idly, how Fury knew it was her, what tells she had given. But then she remembered that it was Fury, and stopped wondering. For a guy with one eye, he had the ability to see just about everything.

But in the present, she fled St. Petersburg with the sulphur stench of explosions clinging to her hair, still off Drakov's radar, and retreated to Arbon, where she had a contact who wanted to contract with her to steal something medical. She was ready for a mission that didn't involve bloodletting.

* * *

Uppsala was a mistake from word one.

To begin with, the G8 summit had been in mid-July, and the Uppsala job kept getting moved around - September, October, August, no September after all, wait what about November? - and if Natalia had kept a brain in her pretty head, she would have cut and run long before she got there, in early October.

The machine was small, nondescript, and she palmed it easily in the scuffle of what appeared to be a botched mugging; her hair was blonde there, her face was obscured, and in three days she'd be in Asia or Africa and unrecognizable as this woman. They wouldn't miss their gadget until they got to the destination, or called the police, and she would not to return to Sweden for a few years.

She was fleeing the scene, a bruise blossoming over her right cheekbone, when she heard rushing air, and she hit the deck a moment before an arrow - _a what?_ \- thudded solidly into the tree behind her, at head height.

She flipped to her feet and took a moment to spot her new friend, the archer, who was on top of a building impossibly far away and notching another bolt onto his string. Well, this job _had_ been too easy.

She feinted right, dove left behind a car, and counted to three before rolling solidly into the narrow alley between buildings. She was angry, annoyed that they sent a fucking _archer_ like it was the seventeenth century, like she wasn't good enough to be taken out by bullets.

She ran, legs burning, through a series of alleys, jumping fences and scaling walls when she had to, until she was running the rooftops, heading for the Central Station, where she would grab a train south to Nyköping, make her handoff, and board a plane to anywhere else, leaving the archer in her wake. She thought she'd try Austria - she'd always wanted to see a real opera in Vienna.

(She thought, for the moment when her adrenaline flagged and her breath caught, as she dropped off a roof by the station, that she didn't even know if she _had_ always wanted that, or if she was just programmed to, but she didn't entertain the idea for long - she didn't have the time for it.)

* * *

_She runs. She's going to leave this place. She's out, she's done with the Red Room. They're coming to put her to sleep, to put her on ice, because she's to be saved for the future, for the time when the Bourgeois menace across the ocean is bigger, worse._

_She dodges men, clotheslines the doctors who try to grab her, and she's only a meter from the entrance, from the front door, when Lev steps into her vision. She hesitates._

_He doesn't._

_Pain blooms hot across her shoulder. It's not a normal bullet, not just a bullet at all. It fells her, and her legs go rubbery. She falls, sprawling on the cold tile of the atrium._

_Lev fills her vision, looming over. "Bad move, Natashenka," he whispers, and he puts the heel of his foot on her shoulder and grinds down._

_She's pretty sure she screams, but he picks her up in his calming arms and takes her back down the stairs to the place where she sleeps._

* * *

Vienna lasted two days, two miserable and rainy days, until she noticed the gleam of a sniper's scope on the building across from her hotel.

She left by night, headed to her safehouse in Krakow, the one with sewer access. She got a week there before she saw the archer, shopping in the open-air market at Nowy Kleparz. He was buying a leg of lamb from a stout old woman, and his Polish was terrible. She followed him briefly; traking him by the clink of dogtags that he wore around his neck, under his shirt, she watched as he bought trimmings and never gave any indication that he saw her. She thought of killing him then, of saving them both the trouble of a prolonged chase, but she imagined his aim, the deadly aim that nearly skewered her in Uppsala, and decided she needed to at least know who he was, who he worked for, before she could kill him.

She watched him walk away with the leg of lamb and imagined him, sharp teeth and nails, taking raw bites from the bone, blood running down his chin like saliva.

She left again that day, decided to go somewhere where she knew the lay of the land better. She contemplated Bishkek, her home-away-from-home, but if she was going to get one up on this apparently psychic archer, she was going to need to play dirty.

She bought a ticket for St. Petersburg using her cell phone (what a miracle, that!) and slipped out of her house via the sewer while a bomb ticked off the minutes in her wake, set to explode at midnight.

* * *

She bought a wig in Minsk, while she waited for her connecting train, a vivid red affair, and she liked the color so much that she decided that, when she had time again, she would color her hair that way, and wear it long.

Oleg was still in Drakov's employ, but Natalia was desperate and they had been what passed for friends, and so she took the chance.

The note left in his car was simple and direct;  
 _Oleg,_  
 _An archer, American, male, maybe ex-military. Leads?_  
 _-Princess_

She trusted him to do the legwork - even if he was going to turn her in, hand her over to Drakov, he would get her the information first out of respect, and maybe she would know why she was being chased before she was killed by either a former employer or a reject from medieval England.

She settled into the ruins of the Red Room, secure in the bunker and sure she would know who was approaching before they had the chance to kill her, and she waited.

* * *

It took a week for Oleg to establish contact, but her archer hadn't arrived yet, so she had time - or she thought she did.

He made the drop in their old place, a bookstore in the city center. There was an elaborate plot about how to find the note, involving a red balloon and books and pages and blue flowers painted on the ground in parking lot, but Natalia hadn't forgotten it, and she was able to retrieve the note he left sandwiched in a fantastical biography of Princess Anastasia.

"Clinton Barton," it said, "Codename: Hawkeye."

* * *

Natalia's hacking was weak at best, if only because she hadn't had time to develop it. She was late at the public library, looking for anything she could find on her Hawkeye.

There wasn't much; old newspapers about circuses, mostly in English, calling him the world's best marksman. That she couldn't speak to, but she liked her odds versus a performer much better than her odds versus a fellow spy or a sniper - especially given that she was a creation of the Soviet response to an American program. Captain America had gone down before she was frozen, but who knew what the Americans had done in the past few years, and she was sloppy as hell for not trying to find out.

( _And how much of that was even true?_ )

She slunk out of the library when it was already dark - it was late October, and she was too far north to expect much more than a waning moon, and once again she knew her decision to stay there was stupid before she more than a few steps out. She considered taking the sewers back to the compound, but her stomach was growling and the streets were still occupied; maybe she would get lucky and be able to have a bite to eat.

She was fortunate to make it to the citycenter unmolested, and she inhaled something that she bought from a street vendor and didn't taste and chased it with a bottle of water sold at a price that was nigh on criminal.

She was a block from the entrance to the Red Room complex, stupid and complacent in her manner, when twenty men emerged from the shadows. Drakov's men, she recognized a few of them, ones who would be out to avenge Oksana Yuryevna.

Natalia didn't like the odds; twenty to one was a poor situation to be in, super spy or no, but she smiled, feral and raw, and jumped into the fray. Let no man say Natalia Romanova went down easily.

The first men who rushed her were idiots - they got in their own way, stumbled into their friends' fists and made it easy for Natalia to use them against themselves, throwing bodies and subverting momentum to break arms and snap necks and choke them out. She took out five of the brutes before they realized they were being too complicated, and the remaining men drew sidearms.

Natalia liked that game, she liked it a lot, so she drew her own gun, managing to get a fair few shots of her own off before one of them got lucky and fired a bullet that grazed her forehead as she turned, spun, dodged.

She took that man out, too, leaving four to face her as blood ran into her eyes.

That was better odds. 

She discarded her empty gun - damn her for not carrying an extra clip - and drew her knives, rushing at the remaining men. It was the best dance, better than ballet by a thousand degrees, and her remaining partners were skilled, lifting and twirling her as she flashed and struck, taking them down with the accuracy born of surgeries and enhancements and the Red Room.

One and two and three were gone and bleeding, and she had a garotte around the neck of four, was quietly choking him out, whispering that he should tell Drakov that she didn't want to play any of his games, when the pain shot up her side.

One of her first kills, one of the men she had counted as down, had gotten back up somehow, and he had drawn her own knife from the back of his comrade to plunge it into her side.

She snapped the neck of her messenger and turned to face her old victim, her knife grinding into the bone of her hip. She just barely dodged his next strike, the butt of the pistol he swung cracking her in the jaw rather than the temple. Still it threw her, and she fell, dazed, on the slippery street - slippery, she thought vaguely, with blood she had spilled. He raised it again to hit her, and Natalia smiled at the thought that at least she took nineteen men out with her, but instead of the sickening crack of her own skull, she heard a familiar whiff of air and a solid thunk from in front of her.

The man in front of her stared at the arrow sticking out of his chest, as though he couldn't understand where it came from, before falling backwards.

Natalia looked up at the man now looming over her. Clinton Barton, codename: Hawkeye, who was to blame for this whole mess with his chasing games. She wanted to kill him, to rip that SHIELD emblem off his chest and shove it down his throat, but the pain was blooming now, in her hip and her forehead and her jaw.

"You here to kill me?" she croaked, using English since his Polish had been so poor, and the pain in her jaw was unbelievable.

"No," he said. "Can you stand?"

She could, but barely - her knife was still lodged in her hip, and the stab of pain when she tried to put weight on her leg was overwhelming at the least.

"I have a place near here," Barton said. "Let me fix you up."

"So you can kill me?"

He slipped the quiver of arrows off his shoulder and offered it to her. "Will you trust me if I give you my weapons?"

She stared, waiting for the catch, looking for any one reason why she shouldn't stab him through the throat with his own arrow. Sirens screamed on a nearby street, some civilian had seen or heard the scuffle and, as civilians did, decide to make her life harder.

"Fine," she said, but only because she didn't need to deal with the police, especially not the ones who worked for Drakov. "But we go to my place, and not yours."

Barton nodded, and put an arm around her waist. She shied away from the touch, and he regarded her for a moment. "Either I help you or a carry you, Miss Romanoff, because you're not making it far on that leg," he said, "And you don't seem like the carrying type."

"It's Romanova," she told him, but she leaned into the offered arm, allowing him to be an extra leg, and led this completely dangerous, totally stupid American archer into her compound, praying to a God who wasn't there that she would wake up in the morning, stupid decisions or not.

* * *

_she does not dream of lev, she does not dream of surgeries and training, she does not dream of her sisters, competing to see who will be the one chosen. in her healing sleep, natalia dreams only of dancing, of pink tutus and black tights, stretching at the barre and pas de deux. she does not dream of blood and guts, she dreams of the rising curtain and the swelling orchestra, and she knows, in her dream, that it is all fake, because she does not feel it the way she does the other dreams, it does not sing and shimmer with reality. she knows, for the first time since she woke up, who she is. and the she wakes, and the dream is gone, and with it the certainty_

* * *

Natalia woke to pain, more pain than she had felt in a long time, but less than she should rightly have felt after walking a block and a half with a knife in her hip. She was sure she'd passed out when they reached the compound, she didn't remember Barton tending to her wounds, but she felt gauze and tape on her skin, knew that he had taken the time to get her back to zero before he took her out.

Barton was in the room, she could feel his cool presence, but he was on the other side of it, quietly working with his hands. She guessed he was working on his bow, maybe, or his arrows, and she really needed to talk to him about that, why he chose them.

"You heal fast," he said, before she even had time to open her eyes. He was good, then. Not as good as she was, but good. "Are you a mutant?"

The word was strange to her ears, perhaps one they never had in her time, so she shrugged, willing her eyes open. "I am Natalia Romanova," she told him, because that should be all he needed to know.

He nodded. "We call you Natasha Romanoff in our files. Don't know how we got that wrong."

She took stock - her clothes were still on, even her boots - where he had worked on bandaging her, he had replaced every scrap, even though it was caked with blood. She thought it was dumb luck that got her an honorable agent on her trail.

"Natasha is a nickname for Natalia," she told him as she sat up, because he was so American, so simple in his thinking, like the only diminutives would be Lia or Nat.

"I'm Clint," he told her, "Clint Barton. But I guess you've known that since Uppsala."

She shrugged again. "I've known for long enough. You're SHIELD. What did I do?"

He smiled. "Well, you went rogue and blew up a G8 conference and you scared all the wrong people."

She stared. "And so you chose to kill me, rather than find out who employed me?"

"We know who employed you, and we took care of them. You-" he took a draft of water from a bottle at his side, and her mouth was suddenly positively arid, she was parched. "You're a variable. My bosses don't like those. If you have shifting allegiances, we need to secure them."

"Are you here to eliminate me or recruit me?" she asked, swallowing dryly. He tossed her the bottle and she caught it one-handed, with even less pain than she felt before. She did heal quickly. She drained the bottle in a single gulp, and he tossed her a second before he answered.

"Officially? Eliminate you." He said it without pretense or preamble, like some men might order dinner. "But what can I say? You intrigue me."

She raised an eyebrow and gestured for him to continue.

"You dodged an arrow in Sweden and ran off faster than I could track. You saw me in Vienna before I saw you, you didn't kill me in Krakow when you knew you could, and then a few hours ago you took out twenty men without help." He huffed a laugh. "I like a scrapper."

"Nineteen," she corrected him. "You took out the last one."

"Nineteen and a half," he offered, like they were bartering kills. "He should have been dead when you did that thing with your thighs. Which, _hot_ , by the way."

She regarded him for a long moment. "So will you kill me, Hawkeye?"

He shook his head. "I think it would be a crime to kill you. You're a work of art, and I try not to destroy art. Come back to America with me."

She laughed, outright laughed in his face. "So your government can vivisect me? So they can kill me privately?"

"So you can show them where your allegiance lies."

"I'm loyal to myself, Barton," she said, "I'm my own beacon." She didn't mention her sisters, or Lev, or the murders she committed in their names, the fact that she was two people or maybe three, who knew. She had to be loyal to something, had to be what she was, and he didn't get to know what that was, not yet.

He just shrugged and went back to his bow - he was oiling it, his hands soft on it like he was handling a lover. "This has a few endings," he said, "one, you come back with me and we'll be best friends. Two, you say no and I give you a gun and face you like an equal. One of us dies, the other goes on. Three, you escape when my back is turned and we play chase some more. I figure, your healing rate you've got about 12, maybe 18 hours before that's a choice. That'll be our deadline, then, okay?"

He dripped more oil onto his rag, never looking up at her. "Twelve hours," he said, "and you give me your decision. Can we agree not to kill each other for twelve hours?"

She nodded, sitting back against the pillows on the cot he'd put her on, watching his hands as they rubbed over his bow, again and again, the motions lulling her to sleepiness.

She thought it was stupid, sleeping in front of this man, but she knew, from evidence and the way he spoke, that he wouldn't harm her. And if he tried, well. She still had a knife in her boot.

* * *

Barton, for all the things he was, knew how to treat a person with a head injury. Natalia's inner clock registered two hours before he was shaking her awake. She had her knife in her hand and pressed to his throat before he knew she was conscious, and he jumped back.

"Easy," he said. "Just need to ask your name."

"Natalia," she told him, and watched his face for a moment before deciding she got a question, too. "Why do you use a bow?"

He smiled. "My bullwhip is in the shop. You make a decision?"

"No," she said, and rolled onto her good side to sleep again.

* * *

Hour four had him shaking her awake again, but this time she was prepared, had memorized the feeling of his calluses, hard won from bowstrings and mending fletchings.

"Who's president?" he asked, and she raised an eyebrow.

"Of what country?"

"Fair," he laughed. "What should I ask you instead?"

"Make me do math," she suggested, glancing around for the bottle of water she had abandoned earlier, and finding it half rolled under the bed. No way she should have been able to contort like that, not with a hip wound, but she did, and took a deep drink.

"Two plus two."

"Chyetirye," she said without thinking, and then amended herself. "Four."

He nodded, and opened his mouth to ask her for a decision again, but she held up a hand. "Were you really in a circus?" she asked, and his smile fell for a moment.

"Yes," he said, and then allowed the mirth to creep back into his face. "Have you made a decision?"

She shrugged. "Honestly, Barton, I don't see any damn reason for me not to kill you and walk free."

He raised an eyebrow, which she decided meant that he was either impressed with her frankness or trying to impress her with control of his facial muscles.

"What if I tell you," he said, the joy now edging into his voice, "that Konstantin Belov defected to the United States in 1960?"

She didn't let the surprise edge onto her face. She thought it was odd that Belov was missing from the internet in general, but so were so many people she believed in. "The same Konstantin Belov who worked for the Red Room?"

He nodded. "The one who said to tell you that love is for children."

That changed everything. It changed more than everything. Belov would know where her sisters were, where Lev was, if any of it was real or if she was just the dancer and not the machine. Belov would pay for everything he had done in the name of the Red Room. 

"Okay," she said. "I'll come to America." 

She didn't add _so long as you let me kill Belov_ and she didn't say she would stay, but in all fairness, Barton didn't ask. She slept for another two hours, and when he woke her the third time, it was with news of an extraction team landing on the roof.

They boarded the helicopter together, Barton still supporting her weak side which, though it was healed significantly, was still sore and stiff. She shivered as the craft rose, watching St. Petersburg fall away below her. She had the sense, then, that she wouldn't be back for a long time.


	3. all this to say, what's it to you?

They changed planes - well, aircrafts - four or five times before they landed in New York, Natalia was exhausted, the altitude and stress and general weariness of travel beginning to creep into her bones, but she didn't dare sleep, couldn't bear to think she might miss a moment of flying across the ocean, of landing in New York, of feeling the dirt of a new continent under her feet for the first time.

She had avoided the Americas. Not consciously, exactly, it was just that her jobs had taken her across Eurasia and into North Africa and she had never had time, not in the year and a half since she was defrosted, to check out that part of the Western Hemisphere.

New York in October was much like any other city in October, but with wider streets, she thought, and maybe angrier people. They bustled her quickly from the plane into a car, one with tinted windows and no handles on the inside. She was sure the glass was bulletproof, too, or maybe just shatter resistant, but she had some faith - Barton had been next to her every leg of the journey, his bow on his lap and his eyes never closing. She wondered when he slept, but decided not to ask. Maybe he was asleep, maybe he was built like her, but it was clear that he didn't trust her. Nor should he.

The car pulled into an underground lot, and Barton smiled at her. "Home sweet home," he said, the first words he'd spoken in hours. She just nodded.

The car glided to a halt, the unseen driver delivering them to a door, and a hand opened her side of the car first.

She looked up into the one good eye of the tall black man who stood before her, and Natalia smiled. "Nicholas Fury," she said. "Here for me?"

"Natasha Romanoff," he countered, and offered his hand for her to shake. "I wouldn't trust you to anyone less."

* * *

Barton was taken off somewhere else, for a debriefing, she guessed, but Fury personally escorted Natalia to a room where someone had laid out a change of clothes and a meal. She used the shower, but redressed in her own clothes, and only eyed the food warily. She hadn't come this far to be drugged at the last moment.

Fury came back after Natalia had sat at their little table and stared at the tray for twenty minutes, her hunger starting to get the better of her.

"Do you want something else?" he asked, and she shook her head.

"I want to see Konstantin Belov," she told him, pushing the tray away from her.

Fury raised his one eyebrow. "Konstantin Belov heard you were coming here and hung himself," he said, the same lack of pretense that Barton had displayed when admitting he was there to kill her. Natalia thought she could have liked these Americans, in another life.

"Then I am sorry you spent the money to bring me here," she said, standing. "I'll go home now."

Fury sighed. "It's not that easy, Miss Romanoff," he said. Natalia thought about correcting him, explaining that her name was Romanova, but she enjoyed, in some way, that these people couldn't even get her name right. Let them call her that, then, and she would be Natalia only for herself. "See, Barton was supposed to kill you, not adopt you." He sat on the cot in the room, facing her. "Now I have to choose - do I kill you myself, when you were so willing to come all this way? Do I build you a cell and spend the rest of our lives making sure you don't break out and break my neck? Or do I offer you a job?"

Natalia didn't answer, but she did sit back down. She was sure Fury wasn't really asking. She knew enough about this man to know that he never said anything without a reason, without something behind it, and she didn't intend to play his game if she could help it. If he was smart, he would kill her now. If he was brilliant, he would recruit her. If he was very, very stupid, he would lock her up and let Belov - who had about a 50-50 chance of being really dead, she figured - perform more experiments on her.

"Of course," he crossed his left leg over his right and rested his elbows onto them, leaning into her space. "We'd have to deprogram you."

She raised an eyebrow. "I was deprogrammed months ago."

"No," Fury shook his head. "You were de _activated_. Before he died, Belov told me the six words I would need to turn you back into the killing machine. But if you let us, we can take that away."

"Why should I let you? So you can give me a new trigger? A new leash?"

Fury shrugged. "I'm not going to tell you to trust me, Romanoff, and you wouldn't even if I did. But we have a rare opportunity here. You agree to be deprogrammed, agree to work for me for a year in payment for that, and I'll give you all the intel we have on the Red Room, its known daughters, and the Winter Soldier."

Natalia's breath caught in her throat. This man was dangerous, and if she was smart, she would walk away right now.

But he knew about her, could offer her something real to sort through the mess of people in her brain.

"Where do I sign?"

* * *

The woman who was deprogramming Natalia was named Maria Hill, and Natalia hated her just a little.

"Lay back," Hill said, and Natalia did. The room reminded her of the infirmary, the one where they had scanned her when she signed up, the one where they told her about some of the changes she hadn't known about. She had no reproductive system, which suited her just fine, and her teeth were ceramic, with two hollow molars that SHIELD had insisted on removing and replacing, in case they could be used to track her.

They looked at her blood, took samples of hair and skin and stool, scanned her inside and out, and pronounced her human, fit for duty, less two teeth and a subcutaneous tracking implant that was no longer functioning.

Hill's room was white, like the infirmary had been, but Natalia felt less at home here, less likely to be cut up.

A week ago, she wouldn't have given that a second thought, the idea that her happy place seemed to be an operating table. But they gave her a file on her, one that confirmed her nightmares and debunked her memories, one that offered pictures and proof of the surgeries and the abuses and the programming. She'd even read her activation phrase ( _three, seven, ace, three, seven, widow_ ) and had the Pushkin reference explained to her.

And now they were starting day two of deprogramming, and Maria Hill was asking her to lay back and look into the light.

It was part hypnosis, part drugs, and part magic, Natalia thought, as the needle pierced the inside of her elbow.

"Lay back," Hill said again, "and breathe deep. Count backwards from ten."

Natalia did as she was told.

* * *

_she is in her bunk and she is making her first kill at six years old and she is shooting a man in the back and she is running a knife through a man in volgograd and she is in lev's arms and she is running_

_she is falling down and she is scorched by fire and she is flayed open and she is counting backwards from ten and she is flying and she is falling and she is spinning_

_she is natalia and she is natasha and she is the black widow and she is the red room and she is the best and brightest and she is the worst and she is no good for anyone_

_she is sleeping in the cold and no time can catch her and she is waking in the dry heat and she is killing the man she sees there and she is in snow and she is in rain and she is in sunshine and she is watching from above as lev makes a kill and she is watching as the man looks up and he is wearing barton's face_

_and she is dancing on a stage and she is spinning and spinning and arms grab at her and she calls out and there are no bodies only arms_

_and she is spinning_  
 _and she is spinning_  
 _and she is spinning_

* * *

She woke in her room, feeling like she'd been run over, or crushed. It always felt that way after session with Hill and the doctors. It had been a month, and she still dreamt panic every time they put her under, still woke to aches and pains and fear.

Barton was in the room, because Barton was in the room half the time when she woke, and he handed her a glass of water, slippery with condensation. She swallowed it down too quickly, the cold burning her throat.

"What year were you born?" he asked.

"1928. You?"

"1977."

That was the game they'd lapsed into - she woke, he asked a question meant to gauge her mental status, she asked a question to sate her curiosity, and maybe they talked. She was fond of him in her own way, couldn't help being somehow attached to a man who couldn't kill her, but she'd never expected to see him again after they landed. 

"You're thirty," she told him, feeling heavy and stupid for saying it.

He shrugged. "You're 79."

"I'm 24," she corrected him, draining the last of the water. "I was frozen for 55 years."

He smiled. She liked his smile, the way he could go from serious to mirthful. She figured it had something to do with knowing so many clowns in his youth, but she didn't ask.

"Do you have a status report on me?"

Barton scooped up a folder from behind him, and handed it to her, collecting and refilling her glass in the same movement.

"They're happy with your progress," he told her, which she could read plainly. "Are you?"

She regarded him for a long moment over the paper. "I don't know," she answered, surprising herself with the honesty. "Half the time I don't know if I'm Natalia or Natasha, and I hate Maria Hill like I hate the Czar."

He raised an eyebrow at that. "Hill's not so bad. She's a lot like you."

"Yeah," Natalia smiled. "I guess."

"Is there anything I can do for you?"

She knew he didn't mean it the way it sounded, knew he was just trying to be affable or kind or whatever completely _American_ thing he was, but it still pissed her right the fuck off.

"What," she asked him, "you think you can fuck the crazy out of me, _Hawkeye_?"

He stared, and shook his head. "No, I don't fuck people who don't know their names."

He turned to the door, and Natalia thought about calling him back, about apologizing, about asking him to stay, but she stayed silent and let him leave. It was safer not to get attached.

* * *

_she is natasha and she is natasha and she is natasha_

_and she is running for the door and she is running for freedom and she is running to escape the cold_

_fury is trying to pump it into her veins or belov or petrovitch or barton or lev or hill trying to freeze her inside out and trying to burn her apart and trying to mold her and trying and trying and trying_

_she hesitates_

_lev fires_

_barton fires_

_fury fires_

_natasha falls and natalia falls and black widow falls and they lift her the men put their hands on her skin and carry her down_

_and hill puts needles in her skin and natasha sleeps and she dreams_

_and she spins_

* * *

Natasha had been with SHIELD for three months - long enough for their Christmas to pass, and hers too - when she walked into Hill's awful room for the last time.

"They tell me this will be my last session," she said, observing Hill, who was drawing fluid into one of her syringes.

"That's the hope," Hill said, setting the needle down on a tray with a few others. "Today we're doing a test. If you'll consent to being restrained, I want to sedate you slightly, and give you the phrase. If you activate, we'll bring you back down. If not, you'll be evaluated for duty."

Natasha - for she was Natasha, it was the name that best described her in-between state - took a deep breath. "Do you know what it's like, Agent Hill?"

"What it's like?"

"To be ripped out of yourself, and to have someone else crawl behind your eyes to take over. Do you know what that's like?"

Hill smiled. "No, I can't say I do."

"Well, take my word, it's not a day at the circus."

"Barton might beg to differ."

Natasha hadn't meant to invoke Barton. He was the closest thing she had to a friend here, the only thing she could count remotely as an ally, and she resented Hill for knowing anything about him at all.

"I consent to restraints," Natasha said.

The buckling in took a few minutes, not least of all because Natasha wanted to make sure she could get out if she needed to, so she complained about tightness until she knew she could slip out when she needed to. She had no intention of trusting herself to be laid bare at Hill's feet any more than she had already been.

When it was time to begin, Hill lifted an alcohol swab to Natasha's elbow and gently sterilized the area.

"You don't like me much," Hill said, with what Natasha was starting to think of as SHIELD-brand bluntness.

"No," she agreed, as the needle pricked her skin.

"I admire you," Hill said, depressing the plunger. "It's not every sleeper spy who would let their former enemies deprogram them."

"I'm not every anything," Natasha said, and she wasn't feeling the sleepiness she normally did - this was more of a muscle relaxant than anything else.

"Still," Hill smiled at her. "If you decide to stay, you'll be an asset."

"And what of you, Agent Hill? To whom are you an asset?"

Hill placed the needle back on the tray, and attached a pulse ox monitor to Natasha's finger. " _Pero entonces viene María con su cesto, escoge una alcachofa, no le teme_ ," she said.

Natasha felt her eyes cross in concentration. She knew Spanish, it was just sticking to the roof of her mouth right now. " _Then comes Maria with her_ \- her--"

" _Her basket_ ," Hill supplied. " _She chooses an artichoke, she is not afraid._ "

"That is a terrible answer," Natasha said, and maybe it was the drugs, but she felt a smile tugging the corner of her mouth.

"I know," Hill said. "Ready?"

"Ready."

Hill's hands shook as she read the words off the paper she was clutching. " _Three, seven, ace, three, seven,_ " she paused to gauge Natasha's face before she finished. " _Widow_ "

Natasha stared back into Hill's eyes, and gave herself over to the smile she had felt before.

"Good job, Agent Hill," she said. "I think you fixed me."

* * *

_As she ran she recited the same mantra to herself, a syllable with every footfall._

__this-is-not-a-dream-this-is-not-a-dream-this-is-not-a-dream __

_A very distant part of her brain, the part she was trying to force into dominance, knew that what was happening wasn't real. But the animal part of her brain, the part where her reflexes lived, could smell the smoke and hear the screaming and she knew that she was to blame._

_Left, right, right, and left, turns she knew by heart, and the smoke was thicker and the screams louder. The fire was nearby - the fire that wanted to sear her bones, the fire that ate her mother, the fire that swallowed the children sleeping in their beds._

_She would not melt._

_She took another left, another right, and burst through the double doors in front of her, the screams at their apex._

_The little girl was huddled in the corner, sitting in a pool of blood, and Natasha was afraid for a moment that it is her own, but the girl looked up, eyes wide and frightened. "Mama?" she asked._

_"No," Natasha told her, but she scooped up the tiny girl anyway, holding the small, fragile child to her chest as she ran back through the hallways, left and right and right and left and down and out, spilling choking out the front doors of the hospital._

_She landed on her knees in the snow, gasping for air, still clutching the child._

_"Get up," a voice said above her, and Natasha looked into the eyes of the people standing around her and knew it was time - the choice. The choice she made every time, and every time it was wrong._

_"Give her to me," Petrovitch said, and Natasha clutched the child closer, shaking her head. Petrovich sneered._

_"If she stays with you, she'll be weak," he spit, but Natasha didn't care, she just held the child._

_"Give her to me," the shade of Natasha said, her eyes dead and her nails stained with red, her hair singed. This was the woman who started the fire, the woman who orchestrated all the death around them._

_Natasha on the ground let out a choked sob, but she didn't relinquish the child, not even to herself._

_"If she stays with you, she'll be afraid," Natasha's mirror image said, but Natasha clutched the little girl closer, struggling to her feet to face the last shade._

_"Give her to me," Barton said, and Natasha was tempted. Barton would be a good caregiver for the little girl. He would take her to Fury, raise her to fight on the side she chose._

_Natasha didn't hand her over._

_"If she stays with you, she will die," Barton told her._

_Natasha turned on her heel, put her back to the hospital, and walked, not looking back as the child cried softly in her arms. When her legs won't hold her up anymore, when her thighs burned and her lungs gasped, Natasha fell, and the child tumbled from her grasp._

_She looked into the face she had saved, and it was her own face, the same little face that was breaking necks at 6, that was in Lev's bed at 16, that was a murderer and an arsonist and a tool for the highest bidder._

_"Stay with me," Natasha told her younger self. "And you can be your own."_

_The little girl nodded, and curled up next to her older shadow in the snow._

* * *

Hill was the first face Natasha saw as she came back to consciousness, looming over her and removing electrodes one by one from her forehead. It was almost upsetting to see her smile; Natasha was far too used to the severe expression Hill normally favored after simulations.

"How'd I do?"

Hill was absolutely smiling. Creepy. "Well, it'll depend on what you say in the debrief, but I'd give you a nine."

"A nine?"

"Yeah. No one gets a ten."

Natasha cocked her head. "What would I have to do, to get a ten?"

"You'd have to save someone from the building who wasn't, you know, yourself."

"Is that even possible?"

Hill nodded. "Yeah, it's all from your brain, your memories. We just nudge it."

"Nudge," Natasha said, tasting the word in her mouth as her restraints were slackened, and she was able to sit up. "Hill?"

"Yeah?"

"Are you doing the debrief?"

She shook her head and handed Natasha a cold bottle of water. "No, it'll be Agent Coulson."

"I don't know Agent Coulson."

"That's kinda the point."

Natasha scowled, but when a young agent asked her to follow him into another room, she went.

"Are you Coulson?" she asked, following him down the twisting turning hallways and she realized, for the first time, that the simulation had been here, this was where she saved herself from, but it had been the hospital, too, and the Red Room complex.

"No," the young man said. "I'm someone else entirely."

Coulson was waiting for her in the room when they arrived, and he gestured for Natasha to take a seat.

"I'm Phil Coulson," he said, offering a hand. Natasha didn't take it. She crossed her arms and leaned back in her chair. No reason to make this easy for him.

He raised his eyebrows at her, but shrugged and flipped open a folder in front of him.

"Okay, Miss Romanoff. Today marks the seventh time you've been subjected to the simulation. Is that correct?"

She shrugged. He knew the answer.

"Really, this isn't an interrogation. I need you to confirm that you've done it seven times."

She sighed. "I confirm."

"And can you state, for the record, the outcome of each effort?"

"The first time, I let the girl die. The second and third times, I gave her to Petrovich. Fourth time, I gave her to Barton. Fifth and sixth times, I told her to choose."

Coulson made a note on his file. "And today?"

"Today I chose to keep her with me."

He was smiling, the son of a bitch, and he made another note. "Why did you choose yourself?"

She didn't say it was because it was the right answer, though, if she were to ever be honest with these people, that would be the truth. The trick wasn't passing their stupid tests - it was outsmarting them.

"I was the only known quantity," she said, instead.

Coulson nodded and made a few notes. They continued on for a while, him questioning every decision she made, until they got to the sleep, and Natasha had no more answers to give. "Anything you want to add?" he asked.

"I'm ready for the field," she said. "I was ready before I got here. Stop wasting our time."

Coulson nodded and rose. "Thank you, Miss Romanoff. It's been a genuine pleasure."

He left without offering his hand again, without watching to make sure she wasn't rooting through SHIELD's super secret files. He left with his back to her, like he was dumb enough to trust her.

* * *

The decision came down that night; she was to be partnered with Barton on a temporary basis, with Coulson as their contact. It seemed like a truly terrible idea, and she smiled to herself when she heard it, because maybe she would have the joy of telling Fury that to his face.

Except it wasn't a terrible idea. They survived as partners for three, four, six months, and when Hill called Natasha in to have her halfway performance review ("It's an expectation setting meeting," Coulson told her, and she rolled her eyes at the very idea) she found herself saying, with all honesty and candor, that she wanted to remain with Barton. And Coulson, if he was part of the deal.

Barton actually cheered a little when she told him that she asked to stay with him, and she found herself not even angry when he pulled her into a crushing hug. "I will take out your eye," she muttered into his chest, mostly for appearances, and she found herself laughing along with him.

They were a team. An actual team.

Of course, things weren't perfect. At month eight, in the middle of a firefight in Cúcuta, Clint mistook her for an enemy and lodged a bolt in her shoulder - would have been her heart if she hadn't seen it coming. She wasn't as mad as she could have been- after all, they both walked away, and they had the child they were to protect, so it seemed like an acceptable consequence.

Four months later, she had a particularly violent reaction to a telepath they crossed in Lisbon and nearly took Clint's head off with a kick. He claimed not to mind, mostly because he had some sick fascination with her thighs, and anything that got them closer to his face counted as a win.

(She didn't miss, of course, that he was in the infirmary for a week and a half when they got back with a herniated disc in his back, but if he wasn't going to complain, she wasn't going to rub it in.)

Natasha got to travel the world with Clint, got to see the seedy underbellies of the best cities, and the sparking nightlifes of tiny towns. She got to know Clint, who was really quite kind under his bravado and idiocy, and Coulson, who was probably the most competent person she'd ever encountered.

A year rolled around, and Fury didn't cough up any files on the Red Room or Lev, but Natasha had decided, by then, that it was a slope, one she had crawled up through some judicious application of cleverness, brutality and sheer determination, and to open the door, to step back out, was a risk she didn't want to take, a decision she would put off as long as possible.

She never mentioned it to Clint or Coulson.

They'd been partners for almost two years when Fury gave her a file on Tony Stark, and she was in Malibu the next day. She wouldn't see Clint again for six months.

* * *

In the aftermath of Loki's incursion, the creation of the Avengers, the death of Coulson (she gave that odds of 30-70 on being true) and the battle of Manhattan, as Steve called it, Natasha and Clint were given an entire week off.

It was a rare luxury, and she took them both to her house in Bishkek, where she could make sure Clint was Clint, and not some broken version of himself, and they could celebrate the world not ending.

And that was the heart of her victory; that her world had continued to spin through every crisis. It didn't end when Barton was compromised. It didn't end in the underdecks of the helicarrier, chased by a monster. It didn't end on a speeder over New York, aliens chattering and gods shooting at her. 

She looked a god - a God? - in the face, and lied to him. She looked her best friend in the eye, and tried to kill him. She looked at herself in the mirror, and remembered a little girl, curling up in the snow next to her, choosing to be her own.

They spent time watching TV, cooking, running; the things that normal people who hadn't saved the world would do. They went to the Bazaar, they went to a museum, and they got into a street fight after dark, back-to-back in an alley as the poor, under trained thugs tried to take them out. She laughed as she took one down, and felt him rumble in return. This was them, this was Clint and Natasha, Hawkeye and Black Widow.

And they stumbled back to her house, blood on her knuckles and a bruise blooming black-green-purple across his cheek, laughing and half-way hoping another gang might mistake them for tourists and draw the fight out, but the returned unmolested.

She brewed cocoa, and they sat to watch the news in Russian as he wrapped her hand and she cleaned a cut on his forehead. They laughed again, forgetting that they had saved the world three days ago, that they had fought shoulder to shoulder with Captain America and Iron Man.

"You know, I missed being your partner," she told him, as he bound her hand. "Loki was pretty sure we were fucking."

Clint laughed. "You didn’t offer him in on the pool?"

"Oh, christ, there’s a pool?"

"What did you tell him?"

She smiled. "I told him love is for children."

Clint stared at her. "Were you hoping he would turn into a slightly nicer version of himself?"

"No," she shook her head. "I was reminding myself that- that I had choices."

"You do, you know," he whispered, leaning forward and tracing the line of her jaw with a finger. "Have choices."

She froze - in part because she was 99% sure her partner was about to kiss her, and in part because someone had said her name. 

Her proper, Russian name, had come from the TV, and she whipped her head to see who was talking.

"Natalia Alianovna Romanova," the voice said, "the Black Widow, is an enemy of the state, and should be returned to us for justice."

Her breath caught in her throat as the camera panned to the man talking, and she caught the glint of silver from inside his sleeve, the tell-tale glint of a prosthetic she knew all too well.

" _Lev_ ," she whispered, and Clint stared at her.

"Nat? What did they say?"

She was on her feet before he finished the sentence, heading for her bedroom. "They said call Hill, and get us an extraction team, because we are in deep shit."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Natasha's activation phrase is a reference to Pushkin's story "[The Queen of Spades](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Queen_of_Spades_\(story\))", and the verse Maria Hill recites is Pablo Neruda's [Ode to an Artichoke](http://www.sidewaysstation.com/2008/07/pablo-neruda-od.html).


End file.
